A TRAVEL writing colleague who likes to boast of having seen everything he reckons has been worthwhile seeing in forty years of jotting his way around the world, has ‘fessed up that on a recent trip to Paris he found a pub that finally made him stop and catch breath before putting pen to note-pad.
For while he may have said pub, he was in fact referring to a hotel and spa that last year was voted in the Condé Nast Traveler magazine’s 30th Annual Readers’ Choice Awards, the Number 1 Hotel in the World.
Which is not a bad effort considering some 300,000 of the magazine’s readers voted on 7,320 hotels and resorts, ultimately giving their Number 1 ranking to Paris’s La Reserve Hotel and Spa. And whilst those who have stayed there would obviously agree, it was for a totally different reason that our colleague stopped to take note.
For he was blown away with how the 4-legged pooches of patrons are pandered to today in the 40 bedrooms/suites of this mansion that was once owned by just one family, that of fashion guru Pierre Cardin in the city’s fashionable eighth arrondissement (neighbourhood,) and where 2018’s prices start from a mind-blowing E1400 per room or suite a night (AU$2,260.)
Those pooches, our colleague found, are offered Evian water in specially-designed bowls if the tap stuff’s not good enough for them, and lounge back on pillows while their owners discuss with the hotel’s Pets Butlers, menus for their canine’s gourmand stays.
Menus, for instance, that for E36 per dish (AU$58) can include a choice of chef-cooked boneless chicken breast with steamed brown rice, various other prime beef or lamb selections with spinach and rice, ham in pasta, or fish with carrots and spinach.
Which reminds us we must mention these tonight to our own pooch when she gets her bone from the chuckaway bin at our family’s butcher…
David Ellis
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